The Republic of India

India’s first years of freedom were plagued by the tragic legacy of partition. Refugee resettlement, economic disruption and inadequate resources for virtually every need, continuing communal conflicts (as more than 10 percent of India’s population remained Muslim), and, within a few months of independence, the outbreak of undeclared war with Pakistan over Kashmir were but a few of the major difficulties confronting the newborn dominion. Lord Mountbatten remained in New Delhi to serve as India’s first new governor-general, mostly a ceremonial job, while Nehru took charge of free India’s responsible government as its first prime minister, heading a Congress cabinet, whose second most powerful figure was Patel.

Gandhi, who accepted no office, chose to walk barefoot through the riot-torn areas of Bengal and Bihar, where he tried through his presence and influence to stop the communal killing. He then returned to Delhi, and there he preached nonviolence daily until he was assassinated by an orthodox Hindu Brahman fanatic on January 30, 1948. “The light has gone out of our lives,” Prime Minister Nehru said, “and there is darkness everywhere.” Yet Nehru carried on at India’s helm, and, owing in part to his secular enlightened leadership, not only did India’s flood of religious hatred and violence recede, but also some progress was made toward communal reconciliation and economic development. Nehru spoke out fearlessly against India’s “caste-ridden” and “priest-ridden” society, which, as a Hindu Brahman pandit, he could do without fear of too much upper-caste criticism. His charismatic brilliance, moreover, continued to make him a major vote-winner in each election campaign that he led (1951–52, 1957, 1962) throughout his 17 arduous years in office as the Indian National Congress (Congress Party)—opposed only by minor parties and independent candidates—dominated political life. Nehru’s modernist mentality and cosmopolitan popularity helped to hide the traditional continuity of India’s internal problems, few of which disappeared under his leadership.

Government and politics

The dominion of India was reborn on January 26, 1950, as a sovereign democratic republic and a union of states. With universal adult franchise, India’s electorate was the world’s largest, but the traditional feudal roots of most of its illiterate populace were deep, just as their religious caste beliefs were to remain far more powerful than more recent exotic ideas, such as secular statehood. Elections were to be held, however, at least every five years, and the major model of government followed by India’s constitution was that of British parliamentary rule, with a lower House of the People (Lok Sabha), in which an elected prime minister and a cabinet sat, and an upper Council of States (Rajya Sabha). Nehru led his ruling Congress Party from New Delhi’s Lok Sabha until his death in 1964. The nominal head of India’s republic, however, was a president, who was indirectly elected. India’s first two presidents were Hindu Brahmans, Rajendra Prasad and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the latter a distinguished Sanskrit scholar who had lectured at the University of Oxford. Presidential powers were mostly ceremonial, except for brief periods of “emergency” rule, when the nation’s security was believed to be in great danger and normal constitutional procedures and civil rights were feared to be too cumbersome or threatening.

India’s federation divided powers between the central government in New Delhi and a number of state governments (crafted from former British provinces and princely states), each of which also had a nominal governor at its head and an elected chief minister with a cabinet to rule its legislative assembly. One of the Congress Party’s long-standing resolutions had called for the reorganization of British provincial borders into linguistic states, where each of India’s major regional languages would find its administrative reflection, while English and Hindi would remain joint national languages for purposes of legislation, law, and service examinations. Pressure for such reorganization increased in 1953, after the former British province of Madras was divided into Tamil Nadu (“Land of the Tamils”) and Andhra (from 1956 Andhra Pradesh), where Telugu, another Dravidian tongue, was spoken by the vast majority. (Andhra Pradesh itself was divided in 2014, with the northern, Telugu-speaking portion being split off to become the new state of Telangana. Hyderabad [in Telangana] served as the capital of each state.) Nehru thus appointed the States Reorganisation Commission to redesign India’s internal map, which led to a major redrawing of administrative boundaries, especially in southern India, by the States Reorganization Act, passed in 1956. Four years later, in 1960, the enlarged state of Bombay was divided into Marathi-speaking Maharashtra and Gujarati-speaking Gujarat. Despite those changes, the difficult process of reorganization continued and demanded attention in many regions of the subcontinent, whose truly “continental” character was perhaps best seen in this ongoing linguistic agitation. Among the most difficult problems was a demand by Sikhs that their language, Punjabi, with its sacred Gurmukhi script, be made the official tongue of Punjab, but in that state many Hindus, fearing that they would find themselves disadvantaged, insisted that as Hindi speakers they too deserved a state of their own, if indeed the Sikhs were to be granted the Punjabi suba (state) for which so many Sikhs agitated. Nehru, however, refused to agree to a separate Sikh state, as he feared that such a concession to the Sikhs, who were both a religious and a linguistic group, might open the door to further “Pakistan-style” fragmentation.

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